A couple of weeks ago I read David Griffith’s ‘A Good War is Hard to Find,’ a meditation about Abu Ghraib, violence, and morality in American culture. It was a wonderfully reflective book, deserving of another read; but neither it nor the passage of several years since the scandal broke quite prepared me for the photographs that Philip Zimbardo, prepared for his talk this past Thursday at the TED 2008 Conference. Wired posted some of the photos along with an interview with Zimbardo, the author of the infamous 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment. What happened at Abu Ghraib, Zimbardo says, shocked but did not surprise him, and should not have surprised the military, either: there was more than enough information to predict what would have happened given the conditions at Abu Ghraib, where a small group of reservists, poorly trained and relegated to lowest rungs of the military status hierarchy, were put in charge of a swelling population of prisoners, including many who were mentally ill than true threats. Zimbardo was an expert witness on behalf of Chip Frederick, one of the military police officers who were punished for what happened there; he argues that though individuals must always be held to standards of personal accountability, we also need to take into consideration the systemic factors that erode individuals’ capacity for sound moral judgment. (Here’s a live blog of the talk from BoingBoing.)
The photos are horrific, gruesome, and appalling - and the slides that Wired previewed don’t even get at the worst of it, apparently. They’re hard to look at, but it’s important to do so: the scope and extent of the torture and humiliation is such that it really impresses upon you how systematic the cruelty became, and it provides a reckoning of the kinds of things that were defended - and, if you read some of the comments and responses to the Wired article, continue to be defended - as necessary for ‘our’ freedom and security. But considering these photos also raise something problematic: as the photos from My Lai pricked the conscience of Americans who were equivocating about the Vietnam War, Abu Ghraib pricked the conscience of Americans who were equivocating about the Iraq War. It seems to me, though, that incidents of this nature have the same relation to the systematicity of war as the behaviors of the MPs have to the systematicity of the prison. We focus on the appalling event, the culpable individuals; but why do we not have a grasp over the vast, churning, often opaque if not invisible combination of forces that enable such things in the first place - what we might call, appropriating from Zimbardo, the ‘Lucifer Effect’?
